Bulltrap: ABCP, and Level 3 Bombs

Remember all when all those breathless experts on CNBC couldn’t stop talking about SIVs, and ABCP? Remember all that talk about the Super SIV and other ridiculous bailout plans? Need a quick refresher? The posts below chronicle the evolution of the crisis…

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Super SIV? Super Bailout!

To summarize real quick, Structured Investment Vehicle (SIV) “…is a fund which borrows money by issuing short-term securities at low interest and then lends that money by buying long-term securities at higher interest, making a profit for investors from the difference. SIVs are a type of structured credit product; they are usually from $1bn to $30bn in size and invest in a range of asset-backed securities, as well as some financial corporate bonds.”

So, borrow short, and invest long. This is called a ‘duration mismatch’ between assets and liabilities and can go very wrong very quickly. (Which is exactly what happened.)

Imagine buying an asset that has a life of 10 years and thay may not be liquid. Simply assume it is difficult to sell in a timely manner at a fair price. Now imagine buying just such assets on credit. Now imagine having the super brilliant idea of using revolving short term credit of say 30 to 90 days to do this. You can obviously imagine what happens when you can’t roll over that debt and therefore have to ditch those assets.

Why would anybody do this? The answer is a simple one. Normally, do to the shape of the yield curve, short term rates are lower than long term rates. Therefore, you could borrow low and invest higher, capturing the shape of the curve. It’s like printing money…

Of course there is no such thing as a free lunch. Capitalism won’t allow it. There is a very good reason that the normal shape of a yield curve is from the bottom left to the top right. A ‘steep’ curve captures certain important risks, such as the uncertainty that is a function of duration.

As the credit bubble began to pop, these giant SIVs became unable to roll over their maturing short term debt. The whole system having been leveraged up like never before meant that the SIV’s couldn’t turn to anybody else to sell their assets too. Without a bid in the market the SIV’s simply froze. Bailouts were proposed and abandoned. Eventually the sponsors of the SIV started taking them on to their balance sheets.

BUT, the write downs didn’t materialize. How was this managed? Well, without an ‘active market’ it was possible to toss these assets into Level 2 and even Level 3 asset buckets. Translation: Those assets found their way into ‘make them worth whatever you want accounting land.’

Related Posts:
Something To Think About: Goldman Sachs, Level 3
Level 3 Rules

Level 2 and Level 3 asset values have just exploded all over the financial system as the major players are desperately attempting to avoid facing reality. They don’t like market prices and they can’t survive market prices. So they make up their values for these assets and wait, tossing them first into the Leve 2 asset bucket and then over into the Leve 3 asset bucket. If the market doesn’t come back, they will eventually have to eat those losses anyways. In most cases, the market won’t come back. EVER. The losses are real and permanent.

In the meantime, the whole system will sit paralyzed…

Or as Mish would say, the ‘Zombification of Banks’ has begun in Fed’s New Role as Pawnbroker: “Thus with each passing day, the more asset values plunge, the more zombified our banking system becomes. Zombification of banks is exactly what happened in Japan. Bernanke could cut interest rates to zero tomorrow and it would not change matters much if at all. Academia is meeting a real world test, and Bernanke has met his match.”

Outstanding Asset Backed Commercial Paper (ABCP) has continued to drop from a high of $1.2 trillion to a recent low of $762.9 billion. The trend is still down and could be for months and even years. Perversely, this actually has the affect of tightening credit conditions the world over.

Take a look at the top 40 companies with Level 3 assets. Sometime soon, the first few will start to implode, unleashing the next phase of the credit crunch…

S&P 1400 and DOW 13 000 are the perfect Bulltrap. This Bear market will rip your heart out and eat your account. Its going to be that kind of market.